A PASSAGE NORTH
By Anuk Arudpragasam
“A Passage North,” Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel, begins with Krishan learning of the death of Rani, his ailing grandmother’s former caretaker, and ends, two days later, with him watching Rani’s body burn on her funeral pyre. The intensely introspective pages in between recount Krishan’s thoughts and memories as he journeys from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Rani’s village in the northeast part of the country, once controlled by the Tamil Tigers and still reeling from a decades-long civil war.
Rani, who died suddenly and possibly by suicide, was “irretrievably traumatized” by the loss of both of her sons — the first lost his life fighting for the Tigers, and the second, only 12 years old, was killed by shrapnel on the penultimate day of the war. Krishan, like Arudpragasam, sees it as his duty to fathom her unfathomable anguish. In this novel, to listen and to notice are moral acts.
Arudpragasam’s mesmerizing debut, “The Story of a Brief Marriage,” narrated a single day in the life of Dinesh, a displaced Tamil man living in a refugee camp. “A Passage North” takes a longer and more distant view of the conflict, which raged from 1983 to 2009. Middle-class and highly educated, Krishan is “possessed by guilt for having been spared” the fate of people like Dinesh. The self-loathing that attends this guilt is both cause and result of Krishan’s enduring obsession with the war. Arudpragasam captures Krishan’s sensitive, roving intelligence as he meditates on the conflict, from its idealistic beginnings, when insurgents dreamed of an independent Tamil state, to its “unimaginable violence” and irreparable psychological damage. The bombs may have stopped, the capital may be thriving, but for those in the country’s ethnic minority, recovery can only be “partial and ambiguous.”
“A Passage North” is a political novel, unequivocal in its condemnation of the many atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government on its Tamil civilians, but it is also a searching work of philosophy. Arudpragasam, who has a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia, poses essential, existential questions about how we should live in a world with so much suffering. What are our obligations to others, especially those, like Rani, who have been marginalized and oppressed? The novel offers one answer: We owe them our full attention.
Every aspect of the world Krishan inhabits is subject to scrutiny. In sentences of unusual beauty and clarity, Arudpragasam observes even the most mundane of actions — smoking a cigarette, waiting for a train, making eye contact with a stranger — with an attention so absolute it feels devotional. He is equally gifted at atmospheric, sensory description that transports the reader to Sri Lanka and India and at examining the emotions — elation, fear, impatience, satisfaction, shame — that simmer below the surface of our everyday lives.
Arudpragasam also makes numerous sweeping, universal statements about the human condition and what we share with even those who seem most distant from us. Sometimes sentences strain under this heavy burden. But, more often, because he precedes these claims with such precise observation, they feel revelatory.
“The Story of a Brief Marriage” earned Arudpragasam comparisons to W. G. Sebald and Primo Levi. His resemblance to those writers is only more pronounced in this novel. But in long digressions on various Tamil and Sanskrit poems, he claims another literary heritage. In a moving, elegant reading of Ashvaghosha’s “The Life of Buddha,” Krishan elevates Rani’s trauma, and thus the suffering of so many like her, to Siddhartha’s disillusionment.
“A Passage North” is full of melancholy, but because it takes love and desire as seriously as it does grief and loss, it avoids despair. Krishan is beset by guilt but he is also filled with yearning, in search of a pleasure “that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world.” This novel offers that kind of pleasure.
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